Letter (From) Home
by Sevenstars
Summary: Daisy, newly settled in at Sherman Ranch, writes to her sister to describe her new situation.


**Letter (From) Home**

_by Sevenstars_

SUMMARY: This is Daisy writing to her sister back East, to tell her about Wyoming and the new home she has found there. It's also my very first _Laramie_ fanfic, though I've written in several other Western universes, notably _Gunsmoke_ and _The Magnificent Seven_. (Details supplied on request.) Besides setting out some of the basic parameters for my version of the _Laramie_ universe (such as the size of Sherman Ranch and the reason we didn't see Andy after first season), I wanted to explore just what the "wild" West might have looked like to an Eastern lady (even one who'd seen service in military hospitals).

Thanks to Noelle for beta and endless support and friendship.

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Sherman Ranch

Laramie, Wyoming Territory

August 9, 1872

Dear Violet,

I must apologize for being so long in answering your very welcome letter. It arrived here nearly a month ago, but I find my time so occupied in caring for my new "family" that I have scarcely any time at all for correspondence; it has taken me this long to bring the place to a semblance of proper order and establish a working routine which allows me to carve out an hour or two to write this. That is why I hope you will share it with Alice and Eunice, as I truly cannot spare the hours to reply individually to each of them.

My days are long and unendingly busy, yet I find that they have truly energized me; I feel more alert, more interested in my surroundings, than I had been in the affairs of my life back East for years (even, I blush to say, when my dear husband and son were with me). I am awakened a little after five each morning by the stove firebox closing as Slim starts the kitchen fire. (My sleeping quarters, as I told you last time, are just off the kitchen, in what must have been his parents' bedroom originally.) He always fills the reservoir before he goes to bed, puts water in the coffeepot, and banks the fire in the stove, then rises first to gather and dump the cinders and ashes and set a new fire; his fires are wondrously efficient, and the touch of a single match fetches a brisk crackling, a tentative hiss, a growing roar, and then a loud _whoosh! _as the warmed pipe tries to suck stove and all out through the roof. He says his father taught him how to do this when he was a child, and it has been his entire responsibility ever since. By the time I have washed the sleep out of my eyes he has the coffee ground and the pot on the burner, and has slipped out the door to do the "barn work." I start the biscuits, which in the West is usually done with a substance called "sourdough," made up of three or four quarts of flour, some warm water, and a dash of salt, and kept in a crock to "work" continuously; as long as I don't allow it to get cold, and toss in more ingredients every day to replace what I use, it can last, Slim says, forever. Sourdough, which has been in use at least since the great California gold rush (and gave its name to the itinerant gold-seekers spawned thereby, who are colloquially called "sourdoughs"), acts the same way as Fleischmann's yeast, and if it is properly made there is no better bread to be had, with an intriguing tang and a lightness equal to the best baking-powder biscuits; unlike saleratus, it imparts no alkaline taste, and it requires no complex measuring like the "starters" we remember from our younger days. It can be used for both loaf bread and biscuits, although my "boys" are all partial to the latter. I am going to write out the instructions for you and enclose them, and I do urge you to try it without delay. It is, Slim admits, "kind of tricky till you get used to it," but do persevere and you will see that I am right. After all, if rough bachelor miners in the wilds of the Mother Lode could master it, surely we women must not allow ourselves to be conquered by it!

About five-thirty Slim comes in with the morning milk and Jess stumbles out of their bunkroom in a semi-conscious and uncommunicative state which is cured only by the application of the strong coffee by then brewed and ready. They drink, then go out to finish their chores while I continue with breakfast. At six they are back, ready to wash up and shave; at quarter past six I wake Mike, and by six-thirty we are all at the table enjoying a hearty country meal much like those you and I used to eat when we were young girls at home: canned or seasonal fresh fruit (Mike is learning the location of every wild berry bush within reach), oatmeal or cornmeal mush, some variety of meat, potatoes, eggs, "hot breads" (a term that includes, as it does down South, rolls, muffins, and biscuits equally), and three times a week—invariably on Sunday—waffles or griddle-cakes. By eight o'clock Slim and Jess have brought in the teams for the incoming stages (four each day), and have their own horses saddled and ready to "pull out" for a day's work on the range. I pack cold food for their saddlebags—much the same sorts of things we used to put in our dinner pails when we went to school: sandwiches or bread-and-butter, cooked meat or poultry, perhaps a little crock of sauerkraut or potato salad (with or without ham), biscuits, doughnuts or fruit-filled fritters, any of a broad variety of home-canned delights (supplied chiefly by neighboring farmers' wives, as preserving was beyond their culinary skills when they kept house here alone, although I am of course resolved to return the household to self-sufficiency in this matter), and for dessert a wedge of pie or cake, cobbler, gingerbread, fried-pies or cupcakes, pudding or sweet biscuit, cookies or tarts, a jar of stewed fruit, or any fresh fruit that may be available. I provide them with coffee to brew, perhaps a can of beans or sausages to warm up, a potato or two to roast in the ashes, or some ham or bacon to fry quickly, and off they go, sometimes together, sometimes in two different directions. It is summer now and the busiest season for cattle ranchers, and often Mike and I don't see them again until suppertime, except briefly when one or both will "swing by" to do the team changes: they plan their day's work with this necessity in mind (very efficiently, I may add), and both are adept at telling time by the sun, in addition to which Jess has a watch. (So has Slim, but he treasures it because it was a Christmas present from Jess, and therefore avoids wearing it on the range for fear of losing or damaging it.) We therefore eat a lighter midday meal than we might if two half-starved men were on hand, and during the day I keep busy with food preparation, bed-making, laundry once a week, and housecleaning. The last of these is, on balance, not so onerous here as it would be back East: the dust is an unending pestilence, but there are few small knickknacks to keep clean—it is obviously a house that has been "all-male" for years—no heavy drapes or upholstery, and no carpet, only two large old buffalo robes, of Slim's father's killing, on the floor in the "main room" (it could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a parlor, though it might claim the title of sitting room). As Mike, with the boundless energy of all small boys, is often ravenous again by three or four o'clock, he and I take a rest then and enjoy a snack: perhaps an apple and a piece of cake, or Mike's favorite, molasses cookies and big slices of crusty bread with wild-strawberry jam on top. Around six-thirty, Jess and Slim having returned home, put up their horses, and done the evening chores, we sit down to "supper," which is more like a hearty tea; hash or baked macaroni and cheese are among our staples for this meal, as are soups and rich stews, baked beans, cold meats of all descriptions, fried potatoes, or even "flapjacks" (a common Western term for griddle-cakes), fried mush, or eggs. Everyone's favorite seems to be firm-poached eggs on toast, wreathed with mushrooms and capped with bacon flakes and red pepper, all dribbled over with the warm pink sauce that Aunt Louisa taught us to make so many years ago. In the evening we gather around the fireplace, I mend and sew (you may well imagine that two hard-working young men and an active small boy are hard on their socks and shirts, and more than once one of them has come in with a tear at the knee), Jess whittles, braids rope or leather, or repairs things, and Slim often reads aloud, especially when the latest edition of the paper or a new magazine has come in. Mike is sent to bed around eight, and by nine or ten the rest of us are ready to retire, the good fresh air and plentiful work having wearied us in a good, pleasant way.

You say Joel asked the size of the ranch. Slim tells me it is considered impolite to ask such questions, but he doesn't mind supplying the answer to "folks way back East." His "tally," or count, is slightly over 800 head, of which he will send to market roughly 40 four-year-old steers and about as many "old" cows, that is, those past the age of ten. The fall "roundup," in which saleable cattle will be chosen and any youngsters born over the summer counted, will begin around September 20, in order that the cattle may all be driven to Cheyenne and sold and the men return home before the winter weather becomes a menace. As even the largest of our neighbors seldom ships more than 550 cattle in a year, the custom is for a group of ranchers to throw their marketable stock together into a single herd (2500 to 3000 head being about the maximum number that can be safely handled) and take them to the rails co-operatively; each ranch provides a man or two, a "string" of horses, and food, and one of the larger operators a cook and a "chuck wagon" (a specialized vehicle designed with a large storage cupboard and drop-down leaf at the back). Slim and Jess are so used to each other that they will probably both go, because the men work in pairs and the trail boss likes to have teams who fit well together. Slim says that in this case he will bring in a man who has worked for him before, an older gentleman known as Ben, to see to the teams and the heavy chores while they are gone; I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting Ben, but he is, in Slim's words, "kind of skinny, but a bear for work." The beef market, Slim says, varies from week to week and even day to day, but the current quotation at the railhead is $20, which means that if all goes well he anticipates bringing in about $1600 for the stock he has to sell, a good year's income and one not even counting his monthly payment from the stage line. He may try to buy some young stocker heifers to replace them, but these are cheaply gotten, as little as $3 per head if locally reared (those brought from a distance are naturally more costly, as they must repay the expense of their relocation). Besides "the cows," a term used here for range cattle of any age or gender, he keeps some two dozen mares of a good breed, and a "remuda," or working band, of 15 to 20 saddle horses, plus our buckboard pair and the coach horses, the latter of which are furnished by the line, although he hopes to eventually begin raising some, if he can acquire some heavier mares.

Most of our neighbors are in similar case to Slim, not the "cattle barons" you read of, but hard-working family ranchers, some of whom have, like the Shermans, been on the ground for 20 years or more (although I must in honesty add that the Shermans were not the first of this type to settle here: they came in, by wagon train, in 1858, after Slim's father had passed several years "bossing" trail-drives of cattle up from Texas, and thereby "earned a stake," as the phrase is). They are generally what is called "small," owning from 100 to 2000 cattle, or "middling," which encompasses anything up to 5000, so you can see that Slim comes almost halfway up the scale of the former. The largest have, at this season, perhaps 30 to 35 cowboys working for them; the smallest make do with the labor of themselves and their sons (and in some cases their daughters). There are also about 20 or 30 families of homesteaders on government claims, many if not most of whom are also "stock farmers," raising small numbers of cattle as a hedge, for Wyoming is not really well suited to farming, especially large-scale grain farming: rain is scarce and uneven, and when it does fall, at this season, is likely to occur in tremendous storms known as "cloudbursts" (or, as Slim sometimes calls them, "toad-stranglers") which may feature falls of hail that can batter a field to rags in minutes. (I have not yet experienced one of these, although I am assured that it is not something I am likely to mistake—or to forget—once I do.) The homesteaders, therefore, till the soil chiefly for their own consumption, using their cattle as a cash crop and filling in with hay, odd jobs (many help out at roundup time, when even comparitively unskilled men can earn good pay by "riding circle," or searching the countryside for fugitive animals, and holding the cattle in herd while they are worked) and winter work. Fortunately this is just the close of "the wet season" on the "high peaks," which rise breathtakingly directly to the east, and between this and the spring snowmelt, the streams and waterholes down here on "the flat" are still full and the stock has plenty to drink. Slim also has on his property at least one spring-fed creek, and a small but dependable lake (known locally, of course, as Sherman Lake), from which he cuts ice in the winter, to be packed into an icehouse dug into the slope behind the main corral, or horse-pen.

Amazingly, it is quite the custom for cattlemen to graze their animals on land to which they have no legal title, and even to fence that land as if they owned it! This, I am told, is because in this country water is literally life, and control of it gives control of land. When Slim's father first settled here, he gained ownership of strips of land along the lakeshore and the running creeks, as well as the entire little valley where our buildings sit and where he had found a deep spring for his well. Because grazing land is valueless unless the animals have access to drink, which he was now in a position to bar, if he wished, to other men's stock, he could use as his own as much as ten times what he actually owned. The land in between water-sources is often grazed by cattle from more than one "spread" (an accurate term, as you can guess, since even the small ranchers are likely to use a considerable parcel; our nearest neighbor is nearly five miles away by the road), which intermingle freely on it, hence the necessity of roundups, one in May and the other, as I have mentioned, near the beginning of the fall. Most of Slim's acreage is fenced, but fence occasionally fails, and cattle may wander through the gap and eventually be swept up with someone else's stock; therefore he always takes part in the common roundup, if only to take charge of any "strays" of his that may be found. The ownership of individual cattle is determined by brands, unique designs burned into their hides when they are quite young (yes, it seems cruel, but I am assured that the calf forgets it in a few minutes); each rancher has his own, which is registered at the county courthouse and also in the Territorial capital, and a calf is considered to belong to the owner of its mother. Slim's brand is simply a big sprawling "S R," connected by a little bar between, which stands, of course, for "Sherman Ranch," and is also mounted on the front of the barn, over the doors. Many cattlemen use more creative devices that involve odd permutations of letters and numbers, symbols, and simple representations of common objects such as bells and spurs.

I cannot begin to describe to you the air in this mountain West: it is so clear, so clean, so unlike the sluggish, smoky air of our Eastern cities, that it goes to one's head like too much champagne. I believe, indeed, that it must take some of the credit for the renewed energy I find in myself. Certainly it, and the work I do, accounts for my much improved appetite! Yet I have gained no superfluous weight—indeed I believe I may have lost some, for I feel lighter and more brisk than ever before; I never suffer dyspepsia or malaise, and am never bored; I feel more useful now than I have since my dear son Troy was a young boy. Owing to the crisp dryness of these altitudes, the mornings can be chilly—even at this season I appreciate my warm quilted robe—but by midafternoon the temperature is in the high seventies. We have an excellent well, deep and cold, although the pump is outside the kitchen door and I must try to persuade Slim to install a counter model. There are two cows and a considerable flock of chickens, and I am delighted to find that the skills of a small-town girlhood have not abandoned me, as the truck garden I planted earlier seems to be thriving, although it is sometimes necessary for Slim or Jess to carry water to it. When they have time they often go fishing (there are both fat perch and excellent trout in the creeks and the lake) or hunt for game, and venison, pronghorn (a somewhat goatlike animal about the size of a sheep but longer-limbed, yielding approximately 40 to 50 pounds of meat, including small, dark, racy steaks more succulent than veal and delicious cutlets as tender as the white meat of chicken), rabbit, and assorted gamebirds are not infrequently on the table; at least two or three days a week one of them will come in from a day's range work with some creature he has happened upon unawares on his way. When the first snows come to the mountains they will go after elk, which are driven down into the lower altitudes by the change in the weather.

Yes, there are Indians, or "red sticks," to use the common local term; this is Sioux country, with Cheyenne to the northeast and Arapaho to the south, as well as occasional Shoshoni venturing down from the higher regions to the north and west. We seldom see any of them, although I have heard—not from Slim or Jess—that they once attacked the ranch and came very near to overwhelming it. Some are peaceful, and Slim occasionally hires one as a temporary hand because they are willing to work for less than white cowboys. One he had last year, Joe Cloud, was cruelly murdered by a local cattleman, which damaged Slim's standing with his neighbors when he insisted on seeing the killer brought to book: in the East we may have forgotten, or at least forgiven, the horrors of Indian warfare, but here it remains very real, and many people think of the native inhabitants as less than human.

The town of Laramie, a rough but bustling community of no more than 600 souls, lies twelve miles away, a distance generally reckoned as being only a little under the average between horse-changes for the stages, which is how Slim came to be approached to run the relay station. It is the seat and most considerable population center of Laramie County, which extends some 120 miles east to west and nearly 100 north to south, and like any country town, is the focus of a large rural district, with ranchowners from as far away as 30 to 40 miles using it as a supply point, and some travelling 60 to 100 to take part in the major festivals such as the Fourth of July. The storekeepers I have met are polite and friendly, apologetic when they lack something I ask for, but willing to order it "for next time, ma'am." Slim has introduced me to a dressmaker, an older woman (though younger than myself) who is raising a family (not her own children, but those of a deceased daughter) by the exercise of her needle (or more accurately her Wheeler & Wilcox sewing-machine) and assures me she will be able to copy any design I see in the ladies' books. (Despite my impoverished state this will not be beyond my means: I am, of course, paid a regular wage, besides my board and keep, and in addition it is the custom here, as farther east, that the garden, poultry, and milch cattle are the property of the woman of the house, who may sell any of their produce (except calves) not needed by the family, and use the money for whatever purpose she desires.) We have several educated people about the town, including "the preacher" who is in charge of the all-denominational church—a genial and pleasant older gentleman named Thomson, with a brisk and practical wife, both of whom have welcomed me warmly—and not a few out on the range; there are three doctors and a midwife, although no dentist (when Jess suffered a toothache some weeks ago it was necessary for me to take him to Cheyenne on the stage to have the offending molar extracted), and the stores are surprisingly varied and well stocked for such a primitive area. There is a general store, a newspaper, a blacksmith and a livery barn, a hotel, a café, a bank (originally established by a successful local cattleman, who is now deceased, and currently headed by his son, though its day-to-day operations are generally in the hands of a vice-president who functions as its manager), a harness-and-saddle shop (with a cobbler cozily domiciled in a corner of it, ready to make repairs on boots and shoes), a dry-goods-and-haberdashery store, a feed store which also sells seed, flour, grain, ice, and fuel, a hardware store, a notions-and-millinery shop, a boot-and-shoe/hat-and-cap dealer, an undertaker's parlors, the stage-company office, even a bakery, and nearly a dozen others, including four or five of the inevitable saloons, the "best" of which is called the Stockmen's Palace and is the choice of Slim and Jess when they go to town.

Of course we deal regularly with the stage-line personnel, the drivers and express guards; these often trade their routes back and forth because, as Slim says, "they get sick and tired of runnin' the same stretch of road all the time." Among them is the driver who first brought me here, an older man (his hair is whiter than my own) named Moses Shell, known to one and all as Mose. Though not young, he is strong and alert, and can handle a racing four-up as well as any of the younger men—or better, as he is not shy of declaring. He is friendly and talkative and praises my cooking to the skies whenever I have pie or some other treat to offer him. Slim is of the opinion that he is "sweet" on me, or, in his words, "He comes a little unhitched when you're around." He has spent some thirty years in these parts, the last ten or twelve of them with the line, driving the Denver-to-Virginia-City route by way of Laramie and Cheyenne.

The law is in the hands of Sheriff Mort Corey, a graying man of average height, perhaps fifty years old, a widower. He is honest and upright, devoted to the keeping of order in his town, and has been following this trade for much of his adult life, except for an intermission to serve in the war; his father, who is in his eighties, lives in Denver and "has been knocking around the frontier almost since there was one," he says with pride, having also worn a badge at various times. The sheriff thinks very highly of both Slim and Jess, and often calls on them when he is in need of short-term deputies. This of course exposes them to danger, but I must admit that I feel very proud to have two such respected young citizens in my care. Mort, as he insists he would prefer me to call him (although I don't yet feel I have known him long enough to do so to his face), sometimes joins us for Sunday dinner, and at these times the natural seriousness of a career law officer is forgotten and he laughs at Jess's jokes, patiently answers Mike's questions, and entertains us with stories of his and his father's adventures.

And now I must really tell you something of this "little family of strays" that has adopted me as one of its own. I have finally discovered that Slim's "whole legal name" is Matthew Jacob Sherman, Jr., but he has gone by his current sobriquet since he was only a youth. He is perhaps not so "slim" now as he was when it was first bestowed upon him—in Texas, when he was accompanying his father on cattle drives—and Jess sometimes teases him about the weight he is putting on. He is about thirty, as blond as a German but with the high color of the Scottish highlands, taller than most men, straight and strong, and has been doing "a man's work" since he was thirteen—older indeed than when many boys in this country begin to do so. He served in the Union army, as my Troy did, as a younger man, and even rose from the ranks to be a second lieutenant and was briefly on the staff of General William T. Sherman—no relation, he insists. He is a hard worker, a strict but fair disciplinarian to hired hands and resident youngsters alike, surprisingly well-spoken, and known and respected throughout the district as a solid citizen, sensible, dependable, honorable, honest, law-abiding, and decisive. Responsibility weighs heavily upon him, since he is the legal owner of the ranch and the signatory to the stage contract, and he is often serious and focused, although Jess has told me that he "was a heap worse, Miss Daisy, when I first come here, till I broke him to saddle." When he relaxes, he has a beautiful smile, and he is friendly and neighborly to all in the area, ever ready to lend a hand to someone in need. He does have a very strict and powerful sense of right and wrong, about which Jess sometimes rebukes him (although Jess is in no case to talk, having a code of his own that is at least as strict, though he is perhaps more pragmatic in some things). He is our linchpin, the stabilizing influence of our household, the one to whom we all look for direction and comfort.

Jess, his ranchhand and best friend, is almost his polar opposite, two or three years younger, I should guess, although sometimes he gets a look in his eyes or an expression on his face that makes him seem much older; I think he has seen some very difficult times, although he never speaks of them in any detail. He has matte-black hair which in lamplight often assumes a deep brown cast, and intense, startling dark-blue eyes in a lean—almost gaunt—suntanned face; his mouth and brows are surprisingly mobile, and as I get to know him better I am more and more capable of guessing his moods by them. He is not as tall by half a head as Slim, but nearly as broad through the shoulders, compact, wiry, graceful and well-knit. It is a treat, I can tell you, to see the two of them come galloping in at day's end, often having raced each other the last quarter-mile or so, sitting so easily in their big Western saddles and handling their horses so deftly—Slim's favorite is a chestnut called Alamo, Jess's a sturdy bay named Traveller that has been with him for several years—that they remind me of the centaurs of mythology. Jess was born in Texas but has wandered widely; sometimes in the evenings he entertains us with stories of some of the places he has been—as far south as Mexico, as far north as Canada, and as far west as Carson City, Nevada. He fought in the war also, although he can't have been much more than a boy at the time, and of course being a Texan he was on the Secessionist side. His schooling is not nearly as good as Slim's, and his handwriting is atrocious, but he seems genuinely interested in improving himself, showing much curiosity about Mike's books, and I have hopes that when the fall work is done and the winter weather confines us to the house I can help him to do so.

I was astonished to learn that this young man with the pleasant if gravelly voice, infectious grin, boyish good looks, and rough-and-ready schoolboy sense of humor was not long ago a "gunfighter"—the term used for men who, having a "quick hand" with the revolvers worn on every hip in this country, hire themselves out to use them for whatever purpose may arise. Yet he was, apparently, of the highest type of the breed, often wont to work not for the highest bidder but for the person he perceived as being in the right; sometimes his side won, sometimes it lost, but he never "drew first," as they say, or killed any man in cold blood. "He was pretty wild when he first came here," Slim told me, "and I should warn you his temper's not on the longest lead you ever saw, though I've never known him to lose it with a woman or a child." In his first year or two at the ranch his past, in the shape of old enemies, old comrades, and people to whom he owed debts of honor, frequently intruded on the new life he was struggling to build here. Several times he rode away, but eventually he always came back; only once was Slim obliged to literally "go and fetch him home." It was, said Slim, as if he were tied here by a rope he couldn't see, but that kept him swinging around the pivot that was the Sherman Ranch, much as a tethered horse may swing around the sturdy snubbing post used to teach them not to pull on a rope or their reins. He used to worry, Slim says, that he would "bring trouble on us here," and indeed several times he did, but he and Slim always managed to overcome it, and now he seems much easier in his mind, more firmly settled into place. His best quality is an unshakeable loyalty to anyone he considers a friend. His greatest area of expertise, apart from his gun, is with horses, and he has full charge of "breaking" the new ones to ride.

Jess is quicker of temper than Slim, less patient, inclined sometimes to jump headfirst into a situation without thinking through his options, "like a frog into soup," as Mort says in the picturesque way of the West. He is a locally noted brawler, and though he never picks a fight, if someone starts one with him, he is unlikely to be the one left on the floor; as a fighter he is skilled and ferocious, and unless laid low by a cowardly blow from behind, he has been known to emerge triumphant over as many as four foes at a time. Papa would have called him a "scrapper," and so he is: despite his very English surname, I suspect the presence of Irish blood, as his coloring suggests. In justice to Jess, however, Slim too can explode rather spectacularly when sufficiently provoked (I have seen him quite prepared to administer a thrashing to a stageline official who had had the temerity to cast aspersions on Jess's character and honesty), and one of Jess's loving nicknames for him is "Hardcase," meaning a tough man with whom it is unwise to meddle. (Another, derived from a stubbornness that can easily match Jess's own, is "Hard-Rock.")

Perhaps because of his past profession, Jess seems to place less value on his own life than Slim does, and is inclined to take chances that seem foolish to an outside eye. He has a dangerous game that he sometimes plays, of standing out in the middle of the yard as a coach comes in and tacitly daring the driver to run him down—or stop the team as short of doing so as possible. This is especially ill-advised when dealing with the "inbound," as we call it—the coach on its way into town, which must descend a long slope and so builds up considerable momentum. The drivers, however, seem to be accustomed to this dare and take it in good part, only rebuking him when they have particularly difficult-to-handle teams or have been running them unusually hard, as sometimes happens when they are trying to make up time. When working out-of-doors, he is always careful to protect his hands with a pair of flexible black leather gloves; apparently a gunfighter must take particular care in this direction. Apart from this habit I see little hint of the "professional" he once was, except when one of us, his "family," is threatened or has been hurt, or when he witnesses some behavior he thinks unjust; at such times a cold stillness settles about him, his eyes darken and flash and his face becomes grim and harsh, his speech quickens and his hand hovers close beside the butt of his pistol. Yet when he is at ease he can laugh and joke and tease in a way that takes fifteen years or more off his age. He can also be gentle and reassuring to an ill or injured person, and displays at once a boyish shyness and a charming old-fashioned gallantry toward women of every age and degree, doubtless the result of his Southern upbringing. He and Slim are both in great demand at all the dances and other frolics, and when dressed in their "best" they are as fine-looking a pair of young men as you will find anywhere.

I've had a good deal to say of Jess, I realize, but I find that for some reason he is my favorite of the three and the one most in need of motherly care, not excluding little Mike. Perhaps it is the underlying sadness I sense in him, the darkness held barely in check, though retreating farther with each year he spends here (almost two and a half to date)—and a genuine sweetness and charm that breaks through regularly. He seems to consider himself a simple man, yet he is in fact a far more complex personality than Slim, with whom what you see is definitely what you get; his emotions run close under the surface, yet he often seems reluctant to let us know what troubles him or what he feels, and I frequently sense that he is holding himself under tight control, as if fearing what our reaction will be if he permits us to see the truth. He is really nothing like my Troy, and yet he seems as close to my heart as any young man could be without actually being related to me.

Mike, whose presence here is the chief reason I was hired to begin with, is eight years old, with red-gold hair and a winning smile, though a bit small for his age, something I intend to remedy with plenty of good food. He was on his way west with his parents, in a covered wagon, when they were killed by Indians some distance west of the ranch boundary. Mike, who was securely hidden in some thick shrubbery, escaped the murderers' notice but saw his mother and father lying dead, which must have been a terrible experience for one so young. Fortunately some wandering entertainers found him and brought him here, and as they were not equipped to take on the permanent care of a child, Slim and Jess resolved to have themselves named his guardians. Despite the dreadful circumstances of his arrival, he shows little sign of trauma, only an occasional nightmare and a tendency to become quietly worried if one of his "big brothers" is away from home longer than expected. Having been a farmer's son, he is familiar with chores and does them, for the most part, cheerfully and willingly. He has the entire care of the chickens, gathers the eggs, brings in kindling (though the heavier firewood is still the responsibility of the men), shells and grinds the feed corn, helps me in the garden, hands me the clothespins when I am hanging out the laundry, sweeps and dusts (though he does sometimes grumble at this, calling it "women's work" and insisting that men only stoop to it when they are "batching," as Slim and Jess were before I came), peels potatoes and apples, shells peas, snaps and strings beans, churns the butter, fills the lamps and trims their wicks (although I don't yet trust him to clean the chimneys), sets the table, dries the dishes, and makes himself generally useful, fetching and carrying for me and for the men when they are smithing, mending harness, and doing repairs about the place. In the evening he helps feed the stock and rake out the stalls, and Slim is teaching him to groom horses and to milk, although heavy tasks such as hauling in water, pitching hay, and splitting wood are still beyond his strength. He is also accumulating a considerable menagerie of pets, including a squirrel which lives in a wire cage in his room, two or three dogs, a large yellow cat, and a fawn, named Twink, that Jess brought home after finding its mother killed by a mountain lion. He has a horse of his own, a full-size three-year-old sorrel named Ember, but Slim hopes to acquire a mustang pony that will be better suited to him; there are wild bands on the nearby mountain among which he is sure he can find one. He also plans to send Mike to the school in Laramie when the term begins this fall; absent the pony I have mentioned, one of us will have to drive him in each morning, but he will be able to come home on the coaches, since Slim and all members of his household are privileged to ride the line free of charge. He may only be able to attend, however, until the serious winter weather sets in (at which point, I am told, drifts sometimes block the roads for as long as two weeks, the stages often stop running for days, and trips to town are necessarily cut back), which probably means that I should anticipate adding "teacher" to my job description. Both of my older "boys" treat him as if he were their little brother, patiently instructing him and making allowances for his youth and inexperience, and Jess affectionately calls him "Tiger," which seems to delight him.

I had hoped that I would have the opportunity to meet Slim's actual brother Andy, who is fourteen now and has been attending school in St. Louis for the last year or so. His letters are regular, looked for eagerly and welcomed with delight by both men, and Slim always reads the latest one aloud to us before the fire. Both he and Jess were deeply disappointed when early in June—quite soon after I had arrived, in fact—Andy wrote begging permission not to come home for the summer holiday. It seems he had been offered a job as a surveyor's assistant by a brother of his algebra professor, which will pay him enough to cover his entire tuition for next year. He wrote that he was beginning to think seriously of entering this profession, which he will be able to do as early as age sixteen if he applies himself to the geometry and surveying courses offered by the school, and wanted "to try it on and see if it fits." The men discussed the matter, and oddly enough it was Jess who gave the clinching argument. "The boy's growin' up, pard," he said quietly, using the lovely abbreviation of "partner" by which they often address each other. "He'll be a man before you know it. Shucks, you know I wasn't much older'n he is now when I set out on my own. It's time you started in lettin' him make some of his own decisions, or else how's he gonna learn to make the right ones?" He explained that he had encountered surveying teams in his travels and believed the work might suit Andy very well; apparently the boy began chafing at the restraints of his life here when he turned ten or eleven, longing to see more of the world and made restless by the stories of the drivers and passengers. "It'll give him a chance to travel, like he's wanted," Jess said, "and get the whole thing out of his system, and make good money while he's doin' it, couple thousand a year. Maybe time he gets to be twenty-five or so he'll be ready to settle down. Laramie ain't got a surveyor yet, but I reckon we could use one, what with land claims and boundary disputes and taxes." This prospect brightened Slim considerably. He had hoped in the beginning that Andy would eventually come into the ranch as a full working partner; when that possibility dimmed, he began to think of the lad as a future attorney; but as he pondered Jess's words he began to realize that his friend, who has seen so much of life, had in his rough way estimated the situation rightly. He wrote back, telling Andy that we would be sorry not to see him, but that "if this is what you think you want, it's good that you get a taste of it first and find out if it suits, like you say." Andy's response was almost incoherent with thanks, and he promised faithfully that he will come home at Christmastime; he said he was especially eager to meet me, and looked forward also to "having a little brother and not being the youngest on the totem pole any more." He asked after his horse, a handsome but tempery palomino named Cyclone who has been turned out into the farther pasture, since if confined to the corral he has a way of biting and kicking at the other horses and sometimes even breaking down parts of the fence; apparently only Andy can really control him, and is truly fond of him.

Jess has told me, "Takes a certain kind of man to be a rancher, to like it and do good at it; it's a gift, like bein' a good shot, or havin' the sense of balance for stayin' on a bad horse. Takes wantin' it, too—not just wantin' to make a success out of it, but wantin' what ranchin' is about. Slim's got all that, and I got a notion maybe Mike does, but Andy never did. Ain't that he don't love the outdoors—he does; but his heart'll never be in the kind of figurin' and worryin' and dawn-to-dusk rough work that ranchin' takes." About Mike he seems very perceptive: certainly the boy often asks when he will be allowed to start helping with "the real work," as he calls it. Jess frequently puts him up on a gentle horse when work permits, or even takes him up in front of the saddle and rides around the nearer pastures with him, or up and down the road a few miles. He and Slim are already agreed that Mike shall have a "lariat"—the long supple manila rope every man carries on his saddle, and the chief tool in working livestock—of his own for Christmas, and Slim is giving him lessons in the proper use of one.

My dear, I do thank you most sincerely for your kind and sisterly offer to take me into your and Joel's home, but I must gracefully refuse. I am _needed _here, just as I was needed in the wards when the war was raging, and I find that now as then, the sense of usefulness and accomplishment I get from my work far outweighs any of the inconveniences and deprivations of living in this frontier environment. I admit that several times I have been in fear for my "boys," sometimes even for myself, but I also know a great feeling of security. Slim and Jess, I know, would literally die for Mike or me—or for each other; they are so much more than merely employer and hired hand, and, as I told the Judge, couldn't care more for each other if they had been born brothers. The easy ways of this West, too, work on me much as its crystal air does; there is a practicality about Western informality, a sense of what is truly important in life, that I fear Easterners have lost track of. Naturally there are bad people here as well as good, but this is true in all human societies, and even the "desperadoes," or desperate men, who pass through from time to time, although they are frightening enough, have little of the casual wickedness found in city criminals; their evil is mere lawlessness or rapacity, and in some of the younger ones, like Jess, almost as much youthful high spirits ill-directed as anything else.

In any case I have many plans for this household, although I shall wait until the cattle are sold and Slim has a better notion of our financial situation than presently before I broach them. I am, as I said earlier, firmly resolved that there will be a pump in the kitchen sooner or later, and I mean to put up some warm drapes at the windows in time for the winter: I have already inquired of the dry-goods merchant in town as to the cost of fabric for the purpose, and am assured that he can supply solid-colored drapery silks in my choice of several hues at less than a dollar a yard, or if something plainer and sturdier is my preference (as I think it may be), heavy cotton plush for thirty cents, plus twenty-five for silkaline for linings; if I buy a full bolt of fifty yards two cents per will be deducted—four from the plush. I mean to have a rod put up in the open archway that connects the main room to the kitchen, and to hang on it at least a length of calico or Scotch plaid, which can be pulled across so that baths may be taken privately before the warm stove. I want to make a hearthrug for the main room, and an afghan for the Turkish-leather couch on which Slim or Jess will sometimes stretch out for a nap before or after supper, and a comfortable pillow for the rocking chair, which has come to be recognized as "Jess's spot." I am studying the lay of the land with the thought of dwarf fruit trees, and will greatly appreciate if you will provide me with the names of some nurseries to which I can send inquiries; I am sure apples will grow in this climate, and probably the hardier kinds of walnut and butternut, but I also wish to seek expert advice regarding pears, plums, and cherries. I will definitely suggest berry bushes, which can be easily made proof against the winter weather with gunnysacking—and attractive to the "boys" by the prospect of pies and preserves next season.

I had almost forgotten one of the greatest lures: in Wyoming I am a full citizen and have the franchise! Yes, believe it or not, the wise men of the very first Legislature, among their earliest official acts, declared that adult women may vote, run for public office, and serve on juries! At an early date one lady, an Esther Morris, was selected as a Justice of the Peace by the people of South Pass City, and by what I am told discharged her office honestly and ably. In the case of the murder of Joe Cloud, of which I told you, the Territorial Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a Cavalry general whom Slim knows personally, served as prosecuting attorney and contrived to "pack" the jury with twelve women, in the hope (which turned out to be well-founded) that they would be more compassionate toward the victim, and less prejudiced against Indians in general, than the men. The newspapers tell us that President Grant will seek a second term, and I have every intention of casting my vote in his favor; Mr. Greeley is a fine man, of course, but some of his causes are not to my taste, and in any case I am not at all certain that the editorship of a newspaper, even one as respected as the _Tribune_ (of which Slim takes the weekly edition), is the most suitable training ground for high political office.

I am eager, also, to see "Roundup Day," the festival that marks the end of the fall gathering and the return of the men from Cheyenne, which is apparently a somewhat livelier version of the country fairs we remember from the autumns of our youth. Jess has described it to me, his eyes shining like a boy's. "It's the biggest blowout of the year, Miss Daisy," he said— "bigger'n Christmas even, 'cause if the snow's bad a lot of folks can't make it in for that. It's like Fourth of July, only without the fireworks. There's a dance, and contests—a horse race and a shootin' match and such, with prizes, and cowhands matchin' each other to see which is the best roper or bronc rider and which ranch has the best cuttin' horse. Folks show off the best of what they got, whether it's livestock or garden sass or things the ladies've made—they even started a pet competition last year. There's a circus got us on its route, it ain't a big one but it knows how to put on a show. We us'ally get one of them travellin' picture fellers, and there's 'most always a medicine show or two." If a "picture feller" proves to be a feature of this year's celebration I shall do my utmost to persuade "my boys" to have a family likeness taken, and will request a print so that I may send you one.

Don't fear for me, darling, for I do not; I believe I have truly found my destined place in life, a second chance, if you will, to make the kind of difference in the world that I would have tried to do if my husband had been spared to me, or if Troy had returned from the war and given me the prospect of grandchildren. I am very happy and feel blessed that the Lord has guided me to this place, where I can play some part, however slight, in making the great Territory of Wyoming all it has the prospect to be.

With love,

Your affectionate sister,

Daisy Hathaway Cooper


End file.
